After an astounding week of ardent media focus on Mitt Romney’s criticism of the initial U.S. response to mob assaults on American diplomatic outposts, the furor is dying down—but it’s not over by any means. Nor was the message that the furor sent a negligible one.

Condemnations of Mr. Romney had come thick and fast. He had been “crass and tone deaf,” in the view of MSNBC’s Chuck Todd. He had committed a “slander” against the president, according to Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic.

Journalists in pursuit of this story—to the exclusion of virtually all else going on—were quick to point out that denunciations of Mr. Romney were by no means limited to Democrats, that criticism came from Republican commentators too. This fact was hardly surprising—the sanctimony of the virtuous knows no political bounds.

The spectacle of those hordes of journalists in single-minded pursuit of the Romney story day after day—days that saw the killing of four Americans, embassies burned and trashed, mobs of the faithful running amok—shouldn’t have been surprising either. It’s the most dramatic indicator yet that in this election the pack journalism of four years ago is alive, and well, and in full cry again.

Especially wonderful to hear were all the charges about Mr. Romney’s political opportunism and tone-deafness—this after three days of a Democratic convention distinguished by shameless, nonstop exploitation of the military raid that put an end to Osama bin Laden. It is impossible to imagine any other president in American history orchestrating even two minutes—much less three days—of the self-glorification and wallowing in a victory won by the nation’s armed forces that was on display at the convention. If any of this orgy of boasting in the interest of a political campaign caught the attention of those commentators whose sensibilities were so offended by Mr. Romney last week, we haven’t heard about it.

The governor’s offense, as the world knows, had to do with his blast at the eye-popping apologias that had come from our Cairo embassy while mobs of the faithful were gathering to wreak havoc over a crude YouTube video insulting to Islam—apologies that Mr. Romney linked to the general inclinations of the Obama administration.

For this he was pilloried as having criticized the president in a time of urgent crisis. Or, as Andrea Mitchell put it Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Mr. Romney had come out with his statement when the State Department didn’t know where Ambassador Chris Stevens was—”the body was missing.”

At the time of Mr. Romney’s initial statement, of course, no word had as yet come about Stevens’s fate or those of his murdered colleagues. Which didn’t prevent members of the press and pundits from proclaiming, all the rest of the week, that Mr. Romney had embarked on a political attack while the world was aflame and the president embroiled in the crisis. The same president who would, in the midst of that crisis, go tootling off to Las Vegas for a campaign fundraiser.

By the time the presidential campaign had ended four years ago, the media’s role in driving the outcome had become a fact too obvious to dispute. The impact of the journalistic horde’s devotion to the Democratic candidates was clear, the evidence vivid—especially in the case of reporters transported to a state of ecstasy over candidate Obama’s speeches. One New York Times reporter wrote of being so moved he could barely keep from weeping. Not for nothing did the role of the press become a news story in itself—an embarrassing one that might, serious people thought, serve as a caution during future campaigns.

In 2012 Barack Obama is no longer delivering thrilling speeches, but an unembarrassed press corps is still available, in full prosecutorial mode when it comes to coverage of the Republican challenger. If you hadn’t heard the story about Mitt Romney’s bullying treatment of another student during his prep-school days—1965, that is—the Washington Post had a story for you, a lengthy investigative piece. On the matter of Mr. Obama’s school records, locked away and secured against investigation, the press maintains a serene incuriosity.

Mr. Obama continues to receive the benefits of a supportive media—one prone to dark suspicions about his challenger. The heavy ooze of moral superiority emanating from all the condemnations of Mr. Romney last week, all the breathless media reports on those condemnations, did not begin with something he said last week. But the moral superiority was certainly on its gaudiest display. Mr. Romney’s tone was offensive, unpresidential, his critics charged.

Yet it is the president of the United States—the same one who presented himself as the man who would transcend political partisanship because we were all Americans—who has for most of his term set about dividing the nation by class, by the stoking of resentments. Who mocks “millionaires and billionaires.” Who makes it clear that he considers himself the president of the other—the good—Americans. How’s that for presidential tone?

No one could have missed the importance to Mr. Obama’s campaign of the class-war themes that reverberated continually during the Democratic convention speeches. The references to “millionaires and billionaires” are by now a reliable applause line for the campaign. Former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm underscored the point with an address whose opening line declared, with a strange note of defiance—it wasn’t the only thing strange about the speech—that the heart of America wasn’t to be found in corporate board rooms.

But it is Vice President Biden who has been the most faithful purveyor of Mr. Obama’s class-war theme. Earnest, affable, with a bottomless cache of wise maxims from his mother and father, the persuasive Joe Biden excels at explaining, in his accomplished infomercial tones, how the other side wants to ensnare you, the poor and the helpless. And how, I promise you, folks, Barack Obama isn’t going to let them.

Mitt Romney isn’t going to have an easy time defeating a president with Mr. Obama’s advantages. A friendly press corps surpasses all wealth, sayeth the sages. The governor will stand a far better chance if he takes to heart the lesson of the past week, when he seems to have recognized, at last, that there are issues in addition to the economy—matters like foreign policy, Iran, America’s stance in the world—that he must address. In the weeks that remain to this election, he will have to speak to those matters in depth and in unflinching terms that set him apart from his opponent. And he’ll have to do it often.

Ms. Rabinowitz is a member of the Journal’s editorial board.

A version of this article appeared September 18, 2012, on page A17 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Fourth Estate, Still Thrilling to the Spirit of ’08.

Bias is a function that emerges from the decision as to “what is news,” what’s considered news, what’s considered a gaffe. And this was one amazing week.

A US ambassador was raped and then murdered in a preplanned attack that the White House lied about because Obama failed to provide that ambassador with anywhere near adequate security. The entire Muslim world was in flames. But do you want to know what the media said the “news” was? That Romney should have waited longer before issuing a statement.

Nope. Journalists will not look deeply at ANY of that because it hurts Obama, and Obama is the only messiah with whom they have to do. And as much as “journalists” love their Big Brother, they hate Big Brother’s Emmanuel Goldstein.

3 Responses to “Mainstream Media Pathological In Its Effort To Slant And Distort The News To Protect Their Messiah Obama And Defame Their Emmanuel Goldstein Romney”

This is not a news story. The flag is being burned by angry people because crazy people in the United States made a movie and released enough of it to drive islamic fundamentalist to violence. Not an accident, and deliberate act by hate mongers living in a neighborhood just like yours!

Obama’s foreign policy failure, if you choose to call it that, was engineered by people living in a neighbor hood just like yours.

There is no evidence that any ambassador was raped. But your doing your best to smear people with lies you can’t document. Romney jumped to conclusion, spoke out of turn and hates Americans to the extent that he wants poverty everywhere it can possibly be shared. The nation has problems that begin in your neighborhood.

Why not move out of Radical Town USA and take root in the land of rational discourse…or…. go on believing that the majority of news services are actually lying?

As for your second assertion, that “there is no evidence that any ambassador was raped,” you again have a problem. Lebanese news reported that Ambassador Stevens was raped. That may not have happened, but when I can cite not one but two news sources in the region (the Lebanese news organization Tayyar as well as the Libyan Free Press), and when the Washington Times reported the story – even though they are now saying that it hasn’t been confirmed – I think that I am more justified in reporting it than you are in saying “There is no evidence” that it happened.

You CERTAINLY are a liar for saying I couldn’t document what I specifically documented in the very article that you claimed I “can’t document.”

The second problem is your fascism as a liberal. Why the hell is it that you demonize free speech??? Why is it that “crazy people in the United States” are resonsible for the violence in Libya??? What is wrong with you??? How is it that you fascists always blame free speech??? Why don’t you go live somewhere where they don’t have a First Amendment???

You see, I live under the Constitution. You live under Sharia damn law where people who practice constitutionally-protected liberties should be suppressed. Where the hell have you been when crap like “Piss Christ” was in vogue and American taxpayers – many of whom were CHRISTIANS were forced to support it? Where the hell have you been pretty much any given week on Bill Maher’s show where he routinely attacks Christianity??? Just what is it about you as a fascist that makes you want to protect other vile fascists because they’ll erupt in violence???

Given your hatred of the First Amendment, YOU’RE the sonofabitch who seriously ought to get the hell out of America.

Just to further document that “Terry L. Walker, Architect” came to my blog and tried to pass-off flat-out LIES as facts, we now know that his statement –

“The flag is being burned by angry people because crazy people in the United States made a movie and released enough of it to drive islamic fundamentalist to violence“

– was not only utterly FALSE relating to Libya where there WERE no protests before the preplanned and coordinated attack that murdered our ambassador, but that he was lying about the violence in EGYPT (which was where it all started in the first place) as well.

USA Today reports that the riot at the U.S. embassy in Cairo appears to have been planned well before the Egyptian media reported on the anti-Islam YouTube film that was blamed for sparking the protest. The protest was reportedly announced on August 30 by Gamaa Islamiyya, an Egyptian terrorist group, to call for the release of its leader, Sheikh Omar abdel Rahman — aka the blind sheik, who is serving a life sentence for the first World Trade Center bombing:

Days of planning and online promotion by hard-line Islamist leaders helped whip up the mobs that stormed the U.S. Embassy in Egypt and launched a deadly attack on the U.S. Embassy in Libya that killed an ambassador and three others. …

The protest was planned by Salafists well before news circulated of an objectionable video ridiculing Islam’s prophet, Mohammed, said Eric Trager, an expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

The protest outside the U.S. Embassy in Cairo was announced Aug. 30 by [Gamaa Islamiyya], a State Department-designated terrorist group, to protest the ongoing imprisonment of its spiritual leader, Sheikh Omar abdel Rahman, who is serving a life sentence in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

Based on the report, it sounds like the anti-Islam YouTube video was a secondary issue — a way for Islamist leaders to stoke anger and draw more bodies out to the embassy protest. If the storming of the embassy was organized by Gamaa Islamiyya — as opposed to a spontaneous uprising — why hasn’t the State Department’s response reflected that? It’s hard to imagine they’re not aware of the group’s activities. In June, the State Department actually issued a visa to a member of Gamaa Islamiyya — again, this is a designated terrorist organization — and met with him in Washington, as part of a delegation of Egyptian leaders. During the meeting, he reportedly asked White House officials to release the blind sheik. Here was the State Department’s defense at the time, which is even more astonishing in light of the latest news:

“We neither had then, nor do we have now, any reason to believe that this particular individual — who at the time of his application was a member of parliament — would pose a threat to the United States,” [State Department spokesperson Victoria] Nuland told reporters.

Nuland pointed to rapid changes in the Middle East, where an Islamist was declared the winner Sunday of Egypt’s first democratic presidential elections a year and a half after street protests toppled strongman Hosni Mubarak.

“It’s a new day in Egypt; it’s a new day in a lot of countries across the Middle East and North Africa. So new political personalities are coming to light,” Nuland said.

“We have more folks who want to come here, want to know us, want to learn about the US, want to develop relationships with us. We have the same interest with regard to them,” she said.

Apparently State miscalculated on that “develop relationships” part.

“Terry L. Walker, Architect” came to my blog and demonized me for “doing your [sic] best to smear people with lies.”

Who’s the liar, you arrogant punk???

I post most of the initial comments I receive (I do weed out the most rabid haters). But nobody gets to post a comment slandering me as a liar TWICE when I’m able to document that THEY are the slandering liars.